Family Matters

“The Squid and the Whale” and “Elizabethtown.”

When little kids look up, they see gods hovering over them. Parents are big, they make things appear and disappear, and they know just about everything, which is one reason kids keep secrets and tell lies—they need to claim a little power for themselves. As children get older, however, their parents seem less and less like gods. They may even seem grasping and dangerous—more like monsters. At the center of Noah Baumbach’s remarkable “The Squid and the Whale” are two brothers—Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), who is sixteen, and a bright and fluent poseur, and Frank (Owen Kline), a twelve-year-old in a sexual uproar—and both boys, as they look at their parents, are caught between feelings of adoration and disgust. The time is 1986, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the land of frontage-envy, fine old furniture, and dark-stained, well-stocked bookshelves. In these idyllic streets, the boys’ parents, both writers, are breaking up and behaving badly. The dad, Bernard (Jeff Daniels), a college English teacher and an increasingly unsuccessful novelist, has become a sour and selfish liar; the mom, Joan (Laura Linney), can’t stop leaving evidence of her love affairs around the house. Desolate over the breakup, and trying to hold on to their love for their parents, the boys fall into nutty imitative behavior. Walt parrots every one of his dad’s huffy opinions; Frank reënacts his mom’s indiscretions by rubbing his crotch against library shelves and depositing his substance on schoolbooks and lockers. “The Squid and the Whale” is a satirical comedy—ruthless and heartbreaking, but a comedy nonetheless. The movie is also about disintegration and the possibility of rebirth. In other words, it’s a small miracle.

We are so used to seeing semi-verbal characters onscreen—taciturn Diesels and blank-eyed Pitts, funny goofs of both sexes—that, at first, the sound of fully articulate people may be a little embarrassing. “ ‘This Side of Paradise’ is minor Fitzgerald,” Walt announces to a friendly girl at school, and he describes the ending of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” as . . . “Kafkaesque.” Since Walt hasn’t read either author, the lines are meant satirically, but some of us may wince as well as laugh. Listening to pompous Bernard, who puts down a local tennis pro as a nothing and patronizes “A Tale of Two Cities” to his son—who then says at dinner that he can’t be bothered to read “minor Dickens”—educated moviegoers may feel a shock of recognition. It’s a shock that’s more like a sting. Is this what we’re like at our most fatuous? Ranking every person and book so we won’t be associated with anything suspected of being second-rate? The sting, however, gradually lessens without quite becoming a caress; it begins to feel like a way of observing closely.

Noah Baumbach, the thirty-six-year-old director of “Kicking and Screaming” (1995) and two other independent movies, draws on elements of his own life. He grew up in Brooklyn, and both his parents are writers. But the best qualifications in the world wouldn’t have helped him if he didn’t know what he was doing, and Baumbach gets some very tricky things exactly right: the way educated parents project both their self-love and their career anxieties onto their children; the way the kids respond to parental misconduct like pilot fish shimmying around a wayward shark. Baumbach has an irrepressibly critical eye. The movie is a fictionalized memoir: Walt is the artist as a young man, the filmmaker-writer-to-be, but, in Baumbach’s telling, the autobiographical figure is no more protected than anyone else. Walt begins his artistic journey as a phony and a plagiarist; at a school talent show, he tries to pass off a Pink Floyd song as his own. The film’s four principals are smart and wily, and yet they always get caught. The memoirist, of course, is the one tripping them up, but, in a project like this, memory must give way to convincing invention. Baumbach persuades us that the characters are so guilt-ridden and bound to one another emotionally that they don’t really want to get away with anything.

Working with relatively inexpensive Super 16 film, Baumbach shot “The Squid and the Whale” in twenty-three days, mostly in a borrowed Park Slope house, for about a million and a half dollars. He’s startlingly sure-footed. The main ideas are set up clearly and developed carefully—much more so than in “Junebug,” another good family film. Yet there’s nothing constricted about the form or the feel of the movie. Family arguments and conferences, and interactions between the boys and their friends, are staged simply and straightforwardly, yet many of these scenes, pointed and touching from the start, take off in surprising directions and come to a climax with a sudden rush of hostility or hurt. The tight editing, which often cuts off a character in need of reassurance or enlightenment, is itself a form of wit. Perhaps it’s easier to create an organic form if you’re making a film about people who have a lengthy shared history; what they say can naturally be fashioned into a single quilt of endearments, quarrels, jokes, and disappointments. Repeated phrases echo off the narrow walls of the Park Slope house; nothing gets lost—the cashew that Frank shoves up his nose at a dinner scene in the beginning pops out after one of his sessions with Onan and alcohol many scenes later. Louis Malle’s scandalous family drama “Murmur of the Heart” (1971), which Baumbach credits as an influence, has a similar coherence, intimacy, and speed, and this is a middle-class American “Murmur”—not as daring or perverse, perhaps, but more tender and enveloping, and better acquainted with failure.

As Joan, Laura Linney is affectingly abashed, though she has one great moment of defiance: Bernard says that he wants to come back—he will reform, he will cook—and Linney erupts in uncontrollable laughter. As Jeff Daniels plays him, Bernard is a classic study in wounded narcissism. Daniels has a long, thick beard—not a sixties-style, free-spirit beard but a nineteenth-century, Old Testament beard—and he speaks in a toneless rumble. When someone assails him, his eyes narrow; the hostile glint that remains suggests that Bernard knows the truth about himself but is unable to grant it more than an instant’s recognition. His disappointment makes him hell to be around, and treacherous, too. Walt, nearly drowning himself in the effort to keep his dad afloat, calls his mother a whore out of loyalty to his father’s suffering. The plot hinges on Walt’s rediscovery of his love for her; Baumbach, in the end, holds out the possibility that Walt, at least, will see his parents as neither gods nor monsters but as screwed-up, very foolish adults. The movie is proof that Walt grew into a man.

“Elizabethtown,” which cost roughly forty times as much as “Squid,” leaves one adrift on a raft of morose questions. How could this vacuous movie have got made? Didn’t anyone at Paramount, which paid for the film, read the script? And also: What in the world has happened to Cameron Crowe? After two charming early films about Gen X dating habits, “Say Anything . . .” (1989) and “Singles” (1992), and the hard-driving and enormously enjoyable “Jerry Maguire” (1996), Crowe’s instinct for storytelling appears to have evaporated. “Vanilla Sky,” from 2001, was overwrought piffle—a Tom Cruise vanity project—which only reinforced the squishy impression left the year before by “Almost Famous,” a semi-autobiographical film so tepid that it never quite worked up a head of steam. “Elizabethtown” doesn’t get going at all. It’s about a handsome young man from Oregon, Drew (Orlando Bloom), who loses a fortune for an international sneaker company by designing a silly shoe. Drew gets fired—and then his father dies. He’s in deep trouble, yet he can’t feel a thing. He travels to his father’s birthplace, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and confronts the enormous family of busybodies that his dad left behind decades ago. But these are his father’s people, not Drew’s, and he walks through the noisy family gatherings in a bemused fog. On the plane to Kentucky, however, he meets a chipper flight attendant, Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who wants to bring him to life. Crowe is attempting a modern screwball comedy—the kind of thing that, sixty years ago, Howard Hawks, directing Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would have turned into romantic farce—but he has scaled the movie as an epic and turned his gabby heroine into a fount of New Age wisdom. Claire tells Drew to embrace his failure, and she and Drew have many conversations about the nature of existence.

At times, the movie became so boring that I experienced the uncanny sensation that I could physically feel the film passing through the projector. As I counted sprocket holes, my sense of what the movie was “about” simply dissolved, and the projector threw onto the screen meaningless images of children screaming, a memorial service going awry, landscapes unfurling outside a car window. Kirsten Dunst, with her cocked head and eyetoothy smile, is spirited enough, but, try as she might, she can’t animate Orlando Bloom. This is one sleeping beauty whom no kiss will ever awaken. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.